Top presidential aide killed, finance minister injured
A close aide to DR Congo President Joseph Kabila was killed and the country’s finance minister seriously injured in a plane crash in the east of the country. Two American crew members also died, as well as two people crushed by the plane as it came down at Bukavu airport on Feb. 12.
The statement identified Kabila’s aide as Augustin Katumba Mwanke, 48, considered a key member of Kabila’s entourage, who had the ear of the president. Finance Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo was in a serious condition, while Sud-Kivu governor Marcellin Tshisambo had suffered fractures in both legs. Antoine Ghonda, a lawmaker who had previously served as a roving ambassador for Kabila, was also among the injured.
The twin-engine Gulfstream 200 had flown in from the capital Kinshasa via Goma and apparently missed its landing at Bukavu airport, in the vast country’s east.
Mwanke had won re-election last year as an MP from southern Katanga for the ruling People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD), of which he was a co-founder. But he was criticised in a report by UN panel of experts as having used his leverage in Kinshasa to obtain substantial tax exemptions for a mining company of whose board he was a member. This network had transferred assets worth $5 billion from the state-owned mining sector to the private companies they controlled, without paying any compensation to the treasury, said the UN report.
The UN panel had recommended sanctions including travel bans, freezing personal assets and barring access to banking facilities against Mwanke and several other officials. They were all suspected of links to criminal cartels, which included Congolese and Zimbabweans that were plundering the country’s mineral resources.
Plane crashes are frequent in the DR Congo. Some 50 airlines operate in the vast central African country, all of which are on a European Union blacklist barring them from operating in the EU because of their safety record
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